Tetris Is Not The Answer [Tetrism]

A very long-running debate about games has gone something like this:

A: Games are the next evolution of storytelling. B: Games are just games. If I want a story, I’ll read a book. A: Games are storytelling because of the branches of possibility they offer. B: No, games are all about gameplay. A: My game story experience is unique. I build my own narrative. B: Tetris does not need a story, you are talking nonsense.

I call them narrativism and tetrism. Is either right?

Narrativism is in love with the idea that games will one day become a dramatic form surpassing film and book because of their interactivity. Tetrism insists that Tetris is an example of a perfect game, all games should be as elegant as Tetris, and (usually) games are not an art.

While I have will much to say on where narrativism is wrong (and it is, deeply so) What Games Are does not advocate the ideal that games’ best days happened in 1984. Nor that games are simply mechanical bulls. Narrativists are trying to say that there is an emotional quality about games, which does not come in a neat package of rules and objects. However they lack the confidence to express that in their own language, and have become lost trying to justify the magic of games in terms that are borrowed from other arts.

At least they’re trying though. Tetrism, on the other hand, is gaming fundamentalism.

The Tetrist

It’s not hard to see why Tetris seems perfect. It has a low adoption curve, but a high maximum mastery. It is extremely elegant in how it’s constructed, to the point of being beautiful. And there is something intrinsically compelling about the game dynamic of sorting oddly shaped blocks into neat rows on a recurring loop. It is thus pure.

The tetrist wants to return to a time of yore when things were perfect. They are driven by the idea of purity, that perhaps at some point the games industry got lost, bedazzled by Hollywood and fast cars, and they find many modern games unsatisfying.

When tetrists say "games are not an art", what they actually mean is that games should not be a "decadent real-world art" ridden with corporate bull and fakery. They have a very dim view of art in general, and tend to be of the "all modern art is rubbish" school of thought.

But actually they are artists in their own way. The indie game movement has a large strain of this sort of purism running through it, as seen in such interesting games as Canabalt. Indies are motivated by a will to creatively self-determine and be accepted.

To the tetrist, games should remain as simple and pure as Mondrian:

Tetrists are thus obsessed with being worthy. Like portrait painters standing in the shadow of Da Vinci tetrists have a real problem in wondering whether they measure up. They see Tetris and some other games from the Golden Age (Pong to Doom) as masterworks, and wish that they could invent something as profound.

This is a self-constructed trap.

The Marketing Fantasy

Just as art cannot stand still and only ever paint in one style, there isn’t really a market for a Tetris 2 or a Super Tetris World. There is also only nostalgia for Tetris in brief intervals, as iPhone apps or interactive TV editions (having produced one of these and seen the figures, I know of what I speak here). The gaming world of players and developers has learned the lesson from Tetris and moved on. There’s no real value to be had in going back, but tetrists still struggle with that to this day.

Where tetrism is wrong is in discounting the importance of fantasy. While a game is not an exercise in storytelling, it is not enough for the player to sort coloured blocks forever. Regardless of how beautiful it may be, any game dynamic eventually becomes repetitive if there is nothing with which the imagination can engage.

The tetrist often mistakes this for marketing. He thinks that the outward shell of the game is just advertising and pizazz to draw in customers, of no relevance beyond that. But in doing so he misunderstands the relationship between player and game. Like any kind of fundamentalist, he then quickly moves on to thinking that most players are sheep held in the grasp of evil marketing and television.

Indie developers in particular often harbour deep frustration with what they see as the corporate conglomerates bewitching the gaming masses and fooling them. Yet as many experts will tell you, that view of how marketing works in the 21st century is nothing short of quaint.

We don’t really live in the broadcast economy any more, which is why old school media has to work much harder (for example, with talent shows like the X-Factor) to hold onto some semblance of its former power. The Long Tail, the Purple Cow and other concepts of oversupply of content choice tell us that the 21st century is a viral landscape, not a broadcast one.

Tetrists are just as much in love with the fantasy of games as everyone else. The only difference is that their cultural bias is deeply rooted in the past. One of the reasons why Minecraft is such a hit is its deliberate retro styling, for example. The tetrist loves that small-textured 8-bit sensibility because it speaks to an emotional part of him. He wants to believe that games exist in an idyllic state, are not over-run with fashion-ability, and so childhood can exist in a permanent state forever.

Founderworks

Tetris and many other games from the early days are not really masterworks. They are founderworks.

In every art there are the early innovators who create the foundation from which all else flows. The Greeks are notable for having founded the conventions of what we consider theatre, for example, and plays such as the Theban Plays set the tone for everything else that follows. What Sophocles, and later Shakespeare and many others, did was to discover many of the major innovations and creative constants of their craft.

It’s a similar situation for games. The challenge that all worldmakers face is that they are not founders. It could be argued (and I do) that all the major constraints of games have been discovered, and so like the theatrical play there is now a fairly comprehensive set of rules by which they operate.

This leaves three choices.

You can:

Regard yourself as a failure, or unlucky, who will never get the chance to make anything as fundamental as Tetris

Kick against the idea of constraints, get angry and attempt to create the gaming equivalent of free jazz

Accept the constraints, but not become complacent, and use them to make great games

The first is the position of the tetrist. I believe in their hearts that they just feel inadequate or unfortunate not to have come up through games in 1975-1985 when all the big discoveries were being made. Unfortunately, this makes the tetrist full of regret. The past is not coming back any time soon, and they know it, but still a great deal of games try to recapture those retro sensibilities and ideals of a simpler time. Meanwhile the audience for games has somewhat moved on, to the point that platform shift is actually starting to make indie gaming seem Palaeolithic.

The second position on that list is the narrativists, people who get all tied up in curio experiments of interactive fiction. Just as misdirected, but fuelled by a different kind of idealism, narrativists are likewise trapped in a negative psychology of their own making. I’ll talk more about this post-Christmas.

The third position is the position of the worldmaker. He is the person who realises what games are and decides to make great games, forgetting drama and fundamentalism and instead embracing dynamics, thauma and artistry.

On that I will be speaking a great deal, because the future belongs to the worldmaker.

(Thanks for reading this. You can stay up to date with this debate by following the What Games Are account on Twitter.)

Comments

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There is a mixture of truth and questionable definitions in this essay. I find myself agreeing with the conclusion, but disagreeing with the strawman term 'Tetrist'

Not all indies with a love of minimalism are moping retro fetishists. (In fact, I don't know any) I see no need to regard yourself as a failure simply because you feel the purity of Tetris (and games like it) are a strong path forward. There is plenty of undiscovered country out in the world of mechanics and systems. And yes, for the most part, the fantasy is merely an entrance and a context, not an end.

I think the reason most indies love minimalism is because it fits within their budget; at least, that's my reason. The increasing price of developing games isn't because we're paying the designers ever more lavish wages, it's because the amount of labor that goes into chasing photorealism is ever increasing.

Yet, indies remember a time when you didn't need to see the reflections off the shiny metal parts of the gun to have a good game. We look back to those previous times and want to recapture the spirit, where we can create a fun game with a small team without having to spend the a sizable chunk of the budget on art assets. (Of course, now it's easier to create and present those old style art assets, so we've lost some of the constraints that helped make those older games so great. But, that's a whole other rant.)

Now, yes, some developers do fetishize the 8/16-bit era a bit too much. They think that game design peaked then, and do want to simply recapture that. But, I think that many of us, at least those of us doing this commercially, see it as a budget thing more than a "purity" thing. And, yeah, it does help our limited marketing budgets if we can tap into a bit of nostalgia as well.... ;)

Could you cite some people espousing the beliefs that you're presenting as prevalent in the game industry? To my mind I cannot think of a major figure in either the indie or AAA space that holds the beliefs you're describing.

Without citations it seems like you're just setting up strawman arguments to make your own opinions seem more reasonable.

i think this "tetrist" is a strawman. i also think that the focus on developers(rather than players) is a HUGE misstep and may be the root cause of a lot of the (IMO) confused thinking in this piece - who cares if some guy feels left out for not having been able to come up with the idea for tetris because he was born too late? there are plenty of interesting games and rules to be uncovered... meanwhile, players still love and at least appreciate tetris, while hundreds of knock-offs and wannabes have come and gone and become forgotten in the last 20 years.

"Where tetrism is wrong is in discounting the importance of fantasy. While a game is not an exercise in storytelling, it is not enough for the player to sort coloured blocks forever. Regardless of how beautiful it may be, any game dynamic eventually becomes repetitive if there is nothing with which the imagination can engage."

all games can - and should - become repetitive at some point. hell, even real life can become repetitive in the right (wrong?) circumstances. i don't see how "fantasy" has anything to do with repetition...

I think the term "Tetrism" _is_ reasonable, in terms of describing fans on the internet and real life. I don't consider it a strawman because I know a lot of people in real-life (game players, not designers) who frequently make the B: statements, where very few fans _or_ game desingers make the A statements. (except for David Cage, maybe) I guess it depends on who you know, but I constantly hear gamers complain about story in a game, about how much more "pure" the game if it were just like Mario or Tetris.

You can't tell me you've never seen an article where someone says "just go watch a movie", "xyz movie is so much better than this worthless game," "games can't tell a story", "go read a book", "Games are about gameplay, they shouldn't have a story".

"Games are the next evolution of storytelling."
As much as, say, a song can tell a story - but still serves as music first and foremost.

"Games are just games. If I want a story, I’ll read a book."
You'd be a blind fool not to see that games have evolved and are still evolving; games have absorbed (and will continue to absorb) - and now reflect - other media and the world around them. But there's still scope for the more abstract, purer forms that effectively constitute building blocks.

"Games are storytelling because of the branches of possibility they offer."
As much as, say, a game of chess or football can be interpreted and represented as a compelling story (good sports journalists touch on this). But the game itself isn't the story; the interpreter makes the story.

"No, games are all about gameplay."
No matter which of the many definitions of 'gameplay' you prefer, this is blatantly no longer true. Play and challenge are at the heart of every game but there's clearly so much more to games these days - and more to come as games bleed into reality and vice versa. Authors and players are getting better at expressing themselves through play. One day games will be like irony, only more widespread; you won't be certain about sincerity ever again :)

"My game story experience is unique. I build my own narrative."
Players (and viewers) can make their own stories from what's suggested (and stories built on suggestion tend to be far more powerful); people can't help themselves; they have to connect the dots. But most players can't, won't ever and shouldn't ever need to be bothered wit that.

"Tetris does not need a story, you are talking nonsense."
Tetris needs a story as much as certain styles of painting, sculpture, music, etc don't. Angry Birds would work fine if it was as abstract as Tetris - but it works significantly better with a story. The characters, plot and sense of place and purpose massively improve Feel, Convenience, Drama and Life. More people can relate to it more readily and more passionately. They don't have to make the same effort to get into it or get anything out of it as they do with the likes of Tetris, but ultimately they get much more out of it.

This is why I get into the realms of term definitions that belong to games themselves. So I use the words 'thauma' and 'numina' and 'storysense' and so on to get at the feelings of what makes games awesome (such as the images that frame Angry Birds) without at the same time getting muddled in old debates.